autotools patch ... what do you think?

A colleague of mine thinks about integrating the autotools framework (automake, autoconf, ...) ... the quasi standard "./configure && make && make install" procedure ... into the Ice package to make it more cross-platform compatible

Would you (perhaps) accept a patch which automake'ifies the whole Ice package?
(Provided it works)

Jam looks good, I agree. What worries me though is that this would add yet another dependency on a third-party package to Ice. This means more testing effort for us, because we'd have to make sure things still work across different versions as they are released, and it adds yet another obstacle to our customers getting started with Ice.

I agree that the current build system isn't as elegant as it could be but, to be honest, before I'd consider changing the build system, I'd first have to find something that absolutely can't be done using the build system we have already.

Can you explain the basis on what you consider to be complication? I can rewrite most of those basic makefiles using Makefile.am's in about 3 lines. configure.in could replace most of the logic in the config/ subdirectory, and do it with proven methods of correctly determining when to use -fPIC for libraries and if you should use -fPIC at all (some platforms use -KPIC for example.

I used autoconf extensively for a former project. Based on these experiences, I decided not to use it again. It would be difficult and very time consuming for me to explain all the details, but let's just say that the complexity of using autoconf was just plain crazy for anything but trivial projects.

Well, I was looking about some to improve the current makefiles (could use some touches here and there), and I thought about cross compilation. What sort of methods do we have to support the setting of --host/--build/--target for gcc? How would cross-compiling work essentially (ie. building for a linux i386 on a sparc running solaris)?